A sickly-sweet smell permeates the grove that the wizard tasked with gathering food steps into, guided by his nose. Approaching a tree, he grabs one of the ripe looking fruits bigger than his head and gives it an apprehensive sniff that is ultimately futile in the glade’s aroma. With a shrug, he bit into the fruit – only to immediately spit it back out as the putrid taste fills his mouth. He drops the fruit and grumbles as it splatters against the ground, splashing and staining his robes. As he fusses with them, trying to wipe them clean, he fails to notice the creature descending from the trees. The strange beast stalks forward on four limbs, approaching softly before it plants its powerful tail on the ground and stands upon it, rising up to cast a shadow upon the wizard who finally glances upward to meet the yellow eyes of the creature.
The remainder of the party is setting up camp and tending to the fire when the wizard erupts from the bushes, clasping his hat to his head as hooting howls and massive fruit launch after him.
Rise brings in a vast array of cool monsters, even in the early monsters, and this another of those that I thought was really fun to build a stat block for. It's still an early level monster and I kept its defenses a little lower while keeping its natural resistances and weaknesses. His melee damage is pretty average while his ranged fruit is low to account for the the conditions that his potent fruit can afflict. Fruity fusillade covers his attack where he launches a non-stop barrage of fruit from his pouch, which I tried to balance with the variety of conditions it can afflict. I wasn't quite sure how to demonstrate its ability to spin through the air like a top or cartwheel through people, but ultimately decided on mimicking the effects of those with trample. For its feats, I was looking for things that allowed it to throw its fruit easier, which led to me picking up Quick Draw, Throw Anything, and Close-Quarters Thrower, the last of which is meant to help emulate that move where he tosses a fruit into his tail and smashes it against a hunter or the ground. Its final two abilities deal with its alternate forms of movement. While bishaten can get through the air, he doesn't seem a capable flyer and seems to rely on thermals or leaping from high places to fly, meaning I unfortunately had to settle this magnificent creature with the glide ability. However, is a fantastic climber that is able to cling to stone walls with its tail alone, leading to me giving it uncanny climber so that it can fling fruit without issue even when ascending a cliff.
Pathfinder 1e:
Not too much has changed for the 2e version of the bishaten. I couldn't settle on any fun, clever reactions for it, so I compensated for that by making its tail slam with fruit an actual ability using Fruit Slam and also gave it some vigorfruit that heroes can potentially recover as noted in its sidebar. One other thing that I got to do was make use of the varying degrees of success with Fruity Fusillade, at least a little bit. Creatures have to take damage to be affected by one of the Potent Fruit now and it's only when a creature critically fails their save against it that they are exposed to all of them. I think this balances it a bit more and might give a slight edge to characters with evasion type abilities, but I'm happy with it.
Pathfinder 2e:
Blue's D&D 5e:
ENCOUNTER HOOKS
Cold Iron Chef: The heroes take what they think should be a somewhat relaxed job working as security for a cooking competition, but when a cart of ingredients goes missing on the road to the competition, they are suddenly assigned to recovering the lost property. If they speak to the driver, he recalls getting hit by something hard enough to knock him off his bench and leaving him temporarily unable to move. By the time he could, whatever had attacked him was gone with the cart. Tracking isn’t too difficult and the heroes discover that the thief was a bishaten that is testing the different, exotic foods in the cart with the fruits that it usually prepares. It jealously guards the cart, meaning the heroes must either defeat it, trade with it, or devise some other means of getting the cart back with as many ingredients intact as possible.
Fruity Fracas: An archeological site in a wild jungle has unfortunately found itself in the middle of several intersecting territories. While these creatures exist in an uneasy truce, they won’t brook these smaller creatures coming in and making a mess of their domain. The heroes are called in to handle the creatures who are each apex predators of their own domains. Among them is an aged bishaten that has grown so inoculated to the dangerous fruit his kind usually eat, that he has been forced to find even stronger stuff. Its potent produce can leave the heroes confused, cover them in sticky goo that pins them in place, or even eat away at their very life force.
As always, lemme know what you guys think! This was a fun build to do and I can't wait to work on some more Rise monsters, but before I get back to them, I have a construct coming up that was inspired by some amazing art I found.
If you're interested in joining the discussion on what creatures I'm working on or just discussing your own homebrew works, check out our Discord! If you want to get some teasers or help us get to our yet unlisted milestones for extra content, check out the Twitter.
Until next time, have a Monstrous Monday!
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